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29 of 31 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Vision for Designing More Useful Information Technology, January 19, 2001
Although this book was written for both people who use computers and for the technologists who use them, the latter are the primary audience. General computer users will find their normal complaints about bulky, balky technology recognized here, but will get little but emotional support for near-term improvements. The primary benefit of the book comes in the many scenarios of interactions with information technology to simplify, speed, ease, and improve the processing to better serve the user's needs. Dr. Dertouzos is always on the cutting edge of the information revolution in his role as the head of MIT's Computer Laboratory. The core of this book is captured in chapter 8, where MIT's new Oxygen project is described. This is a prototype of "human-centered" information technology. The system combines a portable device for wireless communication, a stationary system built into a room (with transportable software from the portable device to the stationary system), and a network to support the interactions of users to the technology in new ways. The strongest part of the book is in complaints about the limitations of current information devices and networks. These will be familiar to any computer user, but it is refreshing to hear them from someone involved in drawing the outlines of the future. These include bulky software that does too much (like the word processing program most of us use that keeps automatically reformating what you have typed into something you don't want), weak interfaces between multiple programs and products so they crash when combined, the need to type so much information in, lousy search engines that waste your time, horrible telephone robots for getting to the right number, difficulties in sharing information, and the burdens of unwanted and unneeded e-mail. His solutions focus on five areas: Letting people converse with information devices in ways similar to how you would speak with a service person in a business; using e-forms to capture your information once and to then automate the sharing of that information with organizations who legitimately need it; finding answers by building on information that others have learned whom you trust; changing the method of distance working and learning so that the interactions are made more realistic and better summarized; and allowing you to tap into personalized, custom software preferences wherever you are and with whatever device you are using. Each area contains several examples of how these changes might work, many drawn from actual Oxygen applications that are now operating. So you should think of this book as focusing on what will be technically feasible in the next five years or so. I hope that Dr. Dertouzos will write a sequel to this book that looks further ahead than that in order to begin to spell out an even more improved version of information processing. As much as I was attracted to his vision here, I found that it mainly focused on enhancing the ways that I do things now. I thought that more could be done to help individuals operate in new ways that would vastly enhance human progress. Problem-solving software designed to help structure issues, gather information, analyze it, get feedback from others on the process, and compare to the potential for perfection could be one such example. Seeing this book also made me realize that much more work of this sort is needed. Without detailed scenarios of how to create solutions that people really want, technologists will continue to provide user unfriendly technology. I suspect that we need a vast experimental activity where people attempt to find new ways to get benefits from technology while removing its hindrances. Those who read about "human-centered" technology will, of course, want to know what the catch is. You will find towards the end of the book that Dr. Dertouzos points out that making the humans a little more standard in their interactions would allow the information technology to work better. So the vision is still a little along the lines of making each of us fit into the round hole in the technology board. With more technology advances, I hope that aspect will quickly disappear. It certainly should be a primary objective. After you finish reading this book, I suggest that you create your own scenario for a better way to get a task done with information technology. Then send it along to Dr. Dertouzos, so he can share it with others. In that way, you can help speed the unfinished revolution talked about in this book. Let's focus on making vast improvements in human benefits, net of human frustration and stress, in all of our technologies rather than focusing on selling products to other technologists! That's the real mindframe shift that is needed!
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13 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
interesting airplane book, February 6, 2001
I call it an "airplane book" because though it was very interesting analysis, it was a superficial roadmap for the future. It gives more of a 10-20 year horizon for academic R&D, rather than the 1-3 year horizon of business ideas. You'd read it once on an airplane trip rather than keep it on your reference shelf. There are some very good metaphors in that when computers "really work properly" we won't feel they are computers anymore. They'll be various communications, control and information appliances. The metaphor of the century-old car steering wheel and gas pedal hiding an immense amount of underlying machinery is a good one for the de-computerization of computers. Keyboards and text will fade awayto voice-in and video-out. The other point of interest to me was a description of the Oxygen Project at MIT. Although the momentum of computer R&D has migrated to industry in the past fifteen years, there are still some clever things being done at MIT, this being one. Oxygen takes a simple, but long range approach: most future computing will consist of three devices- a mobile unit, some bigger immobile unit, and inter-communication. And what are breakthrough features in each? I recommend this book to those interested in computing 10-20 years from now, though you won't find all the answers.
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20 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Unfinishable revolution?, April 25, 2001
Few people have more credentials to speak about progress and challenges in human-computer interaction than M. Dertouzos - the head of the Laboratory of Computer Sciences at MIT, which has a distinguished record of cutting-edge research in this and other fields. And yet many arguments and predictions in the book remain somewhat unconvincing. "Why computers aren't as easy to use as cars?" - asks the author, like many other people before him, frustrated by their perpetual complexity and cumbersomeness. But comparison with cars is misleading. Cars are not designed to allow motorists to put under the hood any additional gadgets they fancy, or to perform arbitrary maneuvers, pushing every button and handle simultaneously. Yet the development of PC industry was based on accommodating ever more and newer gadgets under its cover, and on allowing almost any user's action, short of whacking a motherboard with a sledgehammer. Of course, many flaws of computer systems are due to the industry's geeky origins and traditions, or specific biases of programmers and early users. But the roadmap described by the author is not the first serious attempt at radical improvement, and the goal it is hardly closer today than a few years ago. Why? This probably has a lot to do with the economics of the computer industry, rather than other, more subjective, factors. As much as both hardware and software companies try to convince us how hard are they working to improve usability of their products, to eliminate bugs and crashes, the dirty secret of the industry is that it is not a top priority. Quality simply does not pay. In the "physical" world we often buy new things just to replace broken, or worn-out ones, not necessarily because the older items are hopelessly obsolete. Manufacturers have time and resources to gradually work out the kinks and improve design almost to perfection. With computers, on the other hand, "physical" amortization is low, so the only way to sell new systems is to cram them with more new features, no matter how poorly designed at first, and to make existing ones (no matter how proven and reliable) obsolete and incompatible. Simply reducing the number of bugs will not generate many sales. As a new feature appears, buggy and frustrating to use at first, the economic machine of the computer industry kicks into high gear. Magazines write raving reviews to increase their own sales, add-on manufacturers rush to incorporate it and propagate it down the sales channels, application developers write new drivers and other utilities which make new feature indispensable and previous versions obsolete. As a result, today complex software is not unlike a human genome - a product of often messy and chaotic evolution, rather than a compact and elegant design. Pieces of active, useful code ("genes") are surrounded by "junk", leftover from previous generations of development, often redundant and useless. Why it is there? Because it is easier and cheaper to throw more hardware to crunch ever-bloating volumes of code and not to touch old rusting scrap, than to design and debug fast, efficient code. And it is not getting any better. On the other hand, despite all these intrinsic problems and flaws, many complaints against computers are quite unreasonable. For example, the story often goes, it is difficult to find that text file created two months ago, or where are those digital pictures from the last trip. But this supposedly unfavorable comparison with the "real world" does not hold. Consider, for example, the tree-like directory/subdirectory/file hierarchy, used in most operating systems. In fact it closely resembles a real-world storage system - file cabinet/shelf/file/document, only better. Why are we complaining? Because we have much higher expectations of computerized data storage, than of a traditional file cabinet. A file cabinet requires careful maintenance; if we treat it the same casual way we do computer files, it would be totally unusable in two weeks. Complaints against computers notwithstanding, it is far easier to find past notes and other files on a computer than in a "physical" world. The same with the gripes against Internet search engines, repeated in the book - a familiar story about a list of 10.000 irrelevant links in response to a search query. I think it is just a trite cliché. Frankly, it never failed for me to quickly find stuff even without following "exact" grammar rules recommended by engines. Besides, there is a good chance to discover surprises, interesting and useful information among those "10.000 links". Of course, one could have a negative experience with web searches. In the "real world" a stupid or badly posed question is unlikely to produce a useful answer. Why do we expect a different result from a search engine? Moreover, search engines in the last few years was among the most competitive and dynamic technologies, where leaders changed almost every year - Yahoo, Altavista, HotBot, Northern Light, Google, each progressively offering better, faster, more complete results. The author touts XML and "semantic web" technologies as one of the "saviors" to untangle the computer industry mess. Again, I have serious doubts about this proposed magic bullet. The beauty of the first versions of HTML, when it appeared in early 90's, was its simplicity and universality. Any intelligent person could master it in half a day, and publish a decent-looking web page, which could be seen on PC, Mac or UNIX workstations anywhere in the world. This was truly revolutionary. The XML and "semantic web" at the first glance is just a natural extension along this road. But instead introduces another big layer of complexity, reduces the pool of programmers who can quickly master it, opens the door to innumerable new bugs and inefficiencies. If HTML opened a new chapter in computer history, XML and its companion technologies do not. It is filling the same chapter with comments and footnotes until the text becomes illegible.
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